Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - How to Solve the Female Convict Issue

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July 1, 2014 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

17:20

How to Solve the Female Convict Issue

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	Do you know what fucking annoying is?
	Fucking annoying is having everyone go, Feminism's about equality.
	It's about equality for men and women.
	And then you get an article like this.
	From the New York Times, Women Inmates, Why the Male Model Doesn't Work.
	As the number of women inmates soars, so does the need for policies and programs that meet their needs.
	Well yeah, I suppose, I mean they will probably be needing a lot more sanitary towels than the male prisons will need.
	Over the past three decades, the number of women serving time in American prisons has increased more than eightfold.
	So bitches be getting crazier.
	Okay.
	Some fifteen thousand are held in federal custody, an additional 100,000 behind bars in local jails, which is far less than the number of men in prison.
	Right.
	That sustained growth has researchers, former inmates, and prison reform advocates calling for women's facilities that do more than replicate a system designed for men.
	Right, okay.
	What exactly are you thinking of?
	These are invisible women, says Dr. Stephanie Covington, a psychologist and co-director for the Centre of Gender and Justice, an advocacy group based in La Jolla, California.
	Every piece of the experience of being in the criminal justice system differs between men and women.
	Well yes, it very much does.
	And what do you mean, invisible women?
	They're prisoners.
	They have committed crimes for which they have been jailed.
	They're not invisible, it's just that they are prisoners.
	They're not victims.
	Women often must make do with jumpsuits that are made from men's designs, rather than being cut for female bodies.
	Oh no.
	And standard personal care items often don't account for different skin tones or hair types.
	Are you getting makeup in there?
	Why the fuck are you getting makeup in prison?
	It's not just vanity.
	Just what drives some prisoners to mix their own makeup or tailor their uniforms is the need to maintain dignity in a situation that does little to protect it.
	Oh no, the poor female prisoners.
	Of course, not all women want to wear makeup, says Alyssa Benedict, Executive Director of Core Associates, an advocacy group that is partnering with the National Resource Centre on Justice Involved Women.
	That sounds neutral.
	I have met women inmates who would be insulted if anyone assumed that a necklace is going to make them feel better about what they have to deal with in prison.
	Who gives a fuck how they feel about it?
	Jail is not an unfortunate event that has happened to innocent women.
	These women are in jail because of their own actions.
	They must take responsibility for that.
	They should probably feel bad about being in prison.
	Women's biological needs, family responsibilities and unique paths to prison combine to create incarceration experiences that are vastly different to those of men.
	Well yes, I imagine they are vastly different and I bet you're going to tell us how it affects women so much more.
	I knew it.
	While simply expanding the existing system has provided a turnkey way to deal with the influx of women inmates, funneling women through an infrastructure whose immunities, treatment options and job training programs and cultures of control were designed for male inmates makes an already dehumanising experience even worse.
	It shows the lack of equality between men and women when you attempt to exempt only women from a system that you know to be dehumanising.
	That history can transform otherwise normal prison protocols such as strip searches, supervised showers and physical restriction of movement into traumatic experiences.
	I rather think that is the point of prison.
	You seem to have prison confused with a holiday park.
	This triggering of past abuses can keep inmates with painful pasts in a state of hyper-alertness, causing reactionary behaviour that results in cycles of repeated punishment.
	They will have to learn how to control their behaviour.
	I rather think this lack of self-control is probably the reason that they are in prison in the first place.
	That punishment often comes in the form of the removal or reduction of visitation or phone privileges, further severing the familial connections that can otherwise offer imprisoned women needed support.
	I can't believe I am reading this.
	Offer imprisoned women.
	Just happened to the woman.
	She didn't anything deserve it.
	She's innocent, secretly.
	You know, it's just the patriarchal court.
	They were like, well, the facts say that you murdered him because you're a psychotic bitch.
	And she'll be like, oh, well, that's terrible.
	I can't believe this has happened to me.
	When you incarcerate a woman, you incarcerate her whole family.
	You don't, though, do you?
	Twaddling hyperbole.
	Says Rusty Miller Hill, whose children were put into foster care and subsequently abducted while she served the two and a half years for possession of crack cocaine with intent to sell.
	That's got to be good for the children.
	I very much doubt that they were adopted into another family of crack cocaine dealers.
	The Federal Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates that in 2007, the most recent year for which we have data, 1.7 million children had a parent in a state or federal prison.
	Overwhelmingly, that parent is going to be a man, aren't they?
	But since women inmates are more likely than males to have been their children's primary caregivers, those children are often displaced.
	Yes, it's going to be a very low portion of those 1.7 million children.
	They're either sent to live with family members outside of the home or placed in state care.
	Do you mean to go live with their fathers?
	In addition, the comparatively limited number of women's facilities, like their sports centers or something, there are 28 federal women's prisons versus at least 83 for men.
	Means that often women end up farther from their homes and families, compounding the strain of maintaining healthy relationships while they're serving time.
	Oh no, maybe this is meant to be some kind of deterrent.
	In an August 2013 op-ed in the New York Times, Piper Kerman, author of the prison memoir Orange is the New Black, calls the distance between women prisoners and their families a second sentence.
	Oh no, it's still meant to be a deterrent.
	Kerman stresses the importance of these relationships, noting that they are one of the most important factors in determining whether women inmates would return home successfully and go on to lead law-abiding lives.
	I wonder if getting gang-raped in the asshole is in any way conducive to leading a law-abiding life once you leave prison.
	Think about it.
	I don't get to see my friends and family enough.
	Well, I'm not surprised.
	You're in prison.
	This guy got gang-raped by ten people.
	I think I'll just deal with having to see them less frequently.
	To fill the void left by strained or severed relationships, incarcerated women often turn to one another.
	These prison relationships vary in their dynamics from coercive sexual entanglements that prison staff try to prevent to expansive family-like structures in which women refer to one another as sisters, aunts, cousins, and the like.
	Oh, they're sisters, aunts, cousins, and the like.
	It's so biased.
	It's pissing me off to read, but I want to get to the end, because there are just so many more examples of this sort of nonsense.
	I mean, we cry together, we get mad at each other together, we come back and ask forgiveness together, says Lillian Hussain, who served seven years for identity theft, who was probably cackling all the way to the fucking bank because she stole thousands and thousands off some poor sap.
	There's definitely bonding, adds Stacey Magruder, who had been in and out of prison in Santa Clara for nearly twenty years before starting Sisters That Been There, a support programme for women re-entering life outside.
	But a lot of these times, these bonds are not as healthy as if they would be as if if the women had been healthy.
	Oh my fucking lord, as if I care.
	As if anyone cares.
	But obviously, it's worse for the women.
	Healthy women, Magruder adds, are those who receive treatment for their health issues, support their emotional needs and respect from correctional officers and other prison staff.
	Sadly, she says that's rare.
	Well, fuck me.
	Maybe prisons are supposed to be holiday camps.
	Women inmates are not looked at as people.
	Oh my god.
	They're just a letter, a number, a piece of paper, Magruder says.
	So people treat them like a piece of paper.
	They crumple them up and throw them away.
	Listen, when she's strangling her children to death, I think is when she got crumpled up and thrown away.
	And I think she's the one who chose to do it.
	Alright?
	When she was murdering her husband in his sleep, that's when she chose to throw her life away.
	Don't give me any of this bullshit, hyperbolic rhetoric.
	They are fucking criminals.
	They are people who have committed crimes bad enough that even a woman will get sent to jail for them.
	While the dynamic between male correctional officers and women inmates may certainly be problematic, banning male staff is not the answer.
	Of course it's not.
	Says Core Associates Benedict.
	Male staff has an even more important role in showing, sometimes for the first time, how a man can interact with these women in a respectful manner.
	Are these guards or are they servants?
	Jesus Christ!
	Of course, re-entry is a challenge for all inmates.
	The sudden loss of structure and the reintroduction of choices can be overwhelming.
	Former inmates must relearn little things like eating at a leisurely pace, now they aren't being timed, or sleeping for longer stretches unpunctuated by roll calls, and they need to secure employment, for which prison does not always prepare them.
	Training programmes and jobs that are available to prisoners are often geared to traditionally male-dominated professions such as electrical work, plumbing or construction, since the prisoners can help the facility's upkeep.
	Well, you want more women in STEM fields, don't you?
	As a result, upon release, many women find that the combination of a criminal record and a set of skills best suited to a male-dominated field makes it difficult to get work.
	Well, I'm guessing it's the criminal record that's making it difficult to get work, because I'm pretty sure the male-dominated fields have got quotas, and if not, they probably want all the women they can get.
	But you know what?
	The criminal record is just something that happened to you.
	You know, you didn't mean to steal someone's identity, you know, you didn't mean to smother your children, you didn't mean to do whatever terrible crime it was that actually got you sent to jail.
	It was just something that happened.
	You had no control over it.
	None at all.
	So without a job, finding housing, achieving financial stability, and supporting children can indeed seem like a pipe dream.
	Those poor female convicts.
	That's a lot to overcome.
	Any one of those things would send most of us into a tailspin, says Patricia Van Voorhis, Jesus, who has studied women's risk factors for recidivism in partnership with the National Institute of Corrections.
	But imagine having to do it after you've been so demoralised.
	I can't at all.
	I can't imagine how women manage it.
	Maybe they should all be given trophies.
	Progress is being made to address some of these problems that are holding women's prisons back from being utopian holiday camps.
	Nationally, prison reform advocates are pushing for gender and trauma-responsive policies, and some facilities have made efforts to customise their education and training programmes for women inmates.
	What are they doing?
	Sewing and baking?
	In some prisons, female officers supervise showering and other personal care time.
	Others, facilities are offering support groups that enable women to forge healthy connections with one another.
	A small number of prisons have established nurseries that allow the women to care for their young children during a portion of their sentence.
	Well, I'm glad they're getting all their primary needs tended to.
	It's really good to hear.
	I hate to think of someone in prison going without something they want.
	That would be horrible.
	These changes are a move in the right direction.
	If you're trying to change prison from being a correctional institute to a minor inconvenience.
	But many researchers and advocates say that what's needed is a complete overhaul, and they have an example to back up their argument.
	Hawaii as a role model.
	Don't let Warden Mark Patterson hear you call Hawaii's Women's Community Correctional Centre, the state's only women's facility, a prison.
	He prefers an unpronounceable word.
	The Hawaiian word for sanctuary.
	God, I...
	We don't need a warehouse for women inmates, Patterson says.
	We need a place where we can heal them.
	Fucking.
	Women are just inherently angels, and when something bad like prison happens to them, they definitely need healing to get through this rough time that the universe has bestowed upon them.
	Patterson worked at a male institution for 20 years before moving to WCCC near Honolulu.
	He quickly saw that women's needs were different, he says.
	Changing the way he refers to the facility is just the beginning.
	Patson forged new relationships with organisations in the community that could offer education, substance abuse treatment, and trauma counselling and more.
	I hope he did all this at the men's prison.
	And he's like, right, my job here is done.
	I'm going to go help these women.
	He implemented programs that would get the women closer to nature and to their families through activities like movie nights and carnival style Children's Day.
	Yeah, that sounds awesome.
	That sounds amazing.
	I would love movie nights if I'd gone to prison.
	Throughout their stay, women are invited to give feedback on the support and training they receive to help them recover and grow.
	Recover from what?
	Their own criminal tendencies?
	This transformation from modality of punishment to a modality of change, word salad, Patterson says, has resulted in a 1.3% drop of the facility's inmate population over the last seven years.
	Is 1.3% really statistically significant?
	Some former residents are returning, but usually as volunteers and supporters, and not recidivist inmates.
	When women come to this facility, they are forgiven, and then we teach them how to live a forgiven life.
	Oh my god, it's like he's fucking Jesus!
	Examples of trauma-informed language for women's correctional facilities.
	Instead of referring to inmates by their last names such as Smith, consider referring to them with respect such as Miss Smith.
	Instead of referring to staff by last names, consider referring to them with respect, such as Sergeant Smith.
	Instead of saying cells, consider saying rooms.
	Instead of saying blocks or walks, consider saying pods or wings.
	Instead of saying shakedown, consider saying safety check.
	Instead of saying lug her, consider saying take her to a secure area or document an infraction.
	This is holiday camp language.
	I'm just absolutely staggered that anyone would have the temerity to put the metaphorical pen to paper to write this kind of utterly biased, privileged suggestions.
	This is just...
	The idea of turning women's prisons into holiday camps and then hoping they don't re-offend and forgiving them instantly is the most absurd thing I've ever heard in my life.
	I'm not for like treating prisoners like animals, but I'm also not for treating prisoners like they've just had an unfortunate event occur to them.
	They need to know that it's their own actions that got them in this state, and the place they need to end up has got to be a fairly rough place that they don't want to go back to.
	Not one that they actually quite enjoy visiting a couple of times a year.
	However, I do have a solution.
	Now, we could go through all the hassle of doing all this, or we could just abolish the prison system for women entirely.
	This bit of feminist logic will easily circumvent the issue of women going to prison and suffering a traumatic experience due to it.
	The answer is simple.

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